


Tough Calls

by Niham87



Category: Lovecraft Country (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Delusional Shipper Season Finale, F/F, Feelings Realization, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, No one really died tho, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27035740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niham87/pseuds/Niham87
Summary: Ruby finds out the team came up with a ludicrous plan to stop Christina, it's up to her to prevent the worst from happening.Post-1x09 Delusional Shipper Season Finale (read at your own risk)
Relationships: Ruby Baptiste/Christina Braithwhite
Comments: 9
Kudos: 112





	Tough Calls

**Author's Note:**

> SO this is my brain already dealing with trauma that didn't happen yet. I have to put my master degree in Clownery to use somehow, right?
> 
> Read at your own responsibility. If you do read, I hope you enjoy.  
> You can find me on Tumblr @ niham87

“You promised!”

The preternatural wind bats wildly against Christina’s blonde strands. She looks like a prophetic Medusa about to turn everyone in her path to stone with those devilled eyes of hers. And it’s up to Ruby, to try and be a force of nature herself, and stop this disaster from happening.

From her shoulder, she eyes Ji-Ah, helping Leti to her feet after being whipped to the floor by the dark magic Christina yields, stunned but unhurt. She wonders if this is such a great idea after all. Maybe she’s just as a fool as she claimed her Mama and Leti to be. Maybe she’s just ought to get the fuck outta here. Conquer the world with the metamorphosis elixir and the bit of magic Christina showed her. That’s what she ought to do. She can’t… she’s an idiot. And she’s scared, _real scared,_ for the first time. For herself, for Leti, for the baby… _shit,_ mostly for Christina. 

“You promised you wouldn't hurt her,” she repeats as Montrose frees a weakened and bleeding Atticus from the ritual’s altar. 

He means little for Christina now, useless, the power in his blood diluted by the unborn child. That baby… he’s the axle of her immortal quest now and that means so is Leti.

And all thanks to fucking Tic, his drunk loony father and an omniscient blue-haired Hippolyta whom thought it would be a great idea to use the spell against the sorcerer. Turn everyone to dust as Atticus had accidentally done with Samuel Braithwithe, sacrifice himself in the name of a greater good and family. 

Fools, the lot of them.

What they didn’t know was Christina like she did. They didn’t know how many hours she spent in her studies, envisioning every imaginable outcome, bending this or that, drawing every little detail, correcting every single flaw, and then doing it all over again, and again. They didn’t appreciate the deranged length of her ambition the same way Ruby did by embodying a white woman’s skin as her own. 

She’d got here in time to prevent further damage, what Ruby doesn’t know for certain is if Christina’s word bears the weight that she claims it does… if she is a strong enough variable to stop the whole of it.

“You knew.” Christina scoffs. “You knew about the child and you let me make a fool out of myself. You were going to let me fail, worse… _die.”_

_This bitch is tryna preach to the choir, really?_

“Oh, please!” she sneers. “You wanna get into semantics now? That’s rich.”

Her devil eyes went blank. If it weren’t for the small spasm at the corner of her mouth, Ruby would have thought she imagined the hurt in there.

“Get.. out…” Christina snarls, closing into her, “of… my... way.”

And there it is, what she fears, the difference. The calm pitch of her voice is all she’s ever known of Christina. She never raised it, she never lost composure, always sure, always proper, always her. This beguiling creature in front of her was always under the layers of skin and gristle, either Christina’s or William's, never hiding but neither showing itself. Part of her is just as bewitched as the other is jittery.

“Make me.”

Christina’s acidic laugh echoes through the high stone walls, half hurt, all want. “You think I won’t?”

“Hell, yes, I do!” her tone decreases at least an octave in mellow, even if she didn't mean it to. “Cause you made me believe you. I ain’t have got another choice.”

They are close now. So close it seems the winds have swathed them in solitary confinement. That nothing exists beyond. So close, all Ruby can see is the pitch black of her pupils, the fullness of her lips, the hitch of her breath.

“You want to be better than your father? Start here. Don’t be him. Don’t do this. You want to live a life of firsts? You don’t need eternity. Start here… _with me.”_

Christina gobbles like something hefty is stuck in her throat, and before Ruby may bottle what the glimmer in her white devil eyes could mean, the chamber cracks with the familiar give of skin and bone.

Christina gasps and looks down to the tip of the sacrificial blade poking from the flat of her stomach. Looks back up at Ruby as the delicate lace of her dress stains scarlet red, pain and sorrow drench her eyes and the small, alarmed o of her mouth. 

The swords retracts with a horrifying squelch. The wind’s fury ceases and Christina sways, fragile in a way that Ruby could have never pictured. Her chest heaves and swallows whatever she was going to say as Montrose growls from behind, rushing the sharp metal’s edge through her pearled throat.

“No, _no!_ ” Ruby wails, hands already around the gushing wound. Christina heaps onto the floor, blood billowing, thick between her fingers, spraying her face hot.

Christina gags and chokes on it as Ruby tries to stanch its flow, her graceful fingers cramping like claws over the thick of Ruby’s wrists. There aren’t enough hands, enough time… she looks up at Montrose, and the bastard dares to present her teary eyes. “Help me stop the blood!”

“I had to do it, Ruby.” He shakes his head, blood dripping from the blade still in his grasp. “For my son, my grandson. She ain’t never gon’ stop.”

It isn’t even worth talking sense into crazy. She preens at Atticus instead, now back on his feet, the cuts on his wrists wrapped in makeshift gauze. “Tic! Please…”

“I’m sorry, Ruby.” He waggles his head and looks away. 

Christina gargles something, the sharp of her nails digging into her skin. “Will-- William,” she manages to spit out between bursts of blood, her hazing eyes moving towards the enchantment table by the unopened portal. Ruby scans through it, trying to understand—she spots the red vial… _William’s potion?_

“The potion?” she asks, confused. 

Christina bats her eyes, yes, and it all clicks in Ruby’s mind. What she’d said the first time Ruby went through the cycle of metamorphosis: _A butterfly lives a full life before it dies. And a caterpillar emerges from the same cells, the essence of the butterfly, yet different… it’s more._

Shit… maybe it could heal? 

She has to try and right quick cause Christina is wheezing slower by the tick of the second. There’s no way she’s gonna make it if Ruby lets go. She turns to Leti, who’s nearby looking morose. 

“Get the potion, Leti!”

“Ruby, I--”

“Are you fucking kidding me right, now? Who in this motherfucker made your ass invulnerable, huh, Leti?” she looks around the room in disbelief. “Shit, she was good enough when y’all needed help, but now she ain’t worthy to try and save?”

No one has the galls to look her straight in the eye, and Ruby was about to make a run for it when Leti mumbles a _fuck_ under her breath. 

“Leti! Hell, no! Let that witch die!” Montrose tries to intervene, but Atticus stops him.

“Let her, pops.” 

Ruby’s popping the motherfucker open and shoving the liquid down Christina’s lips in a matter of seconds. “That’s it, baby. Drink it all.”

She swallows arduously, way more of her blood than potion itself and Ruby can’t do anything but hope. Watch in desperate anticipation as her lithe body begins to fill and shape into Williams’. Wait for the skin underneath her hands to expand and adapt, reborn. 

Once she feels confident it’s definitely happening, Ruby rips the remains of the dress open. The taut muscle of William’s abdomen is pristine, just smeared by wet blood where a wound should’ve been. 

“It’s working,” she whispers to herself more than anyone else, cradling William’s face onto her palms. “Christina, it’s working.”

Nothing. No response. No movement. _God…_ she’s isn’t breathing. _No, no, no, nononono._

“Christina!” she shakes William’s shoulders, still clammy but warm to her touch. “Can you hear me? Goddammit, I swear… I didn’t go through all of this shit for nothing! You better breathe, you hear me?”

And just like so, William’s chest rattles with a gruelling gasp. She doesn’t quite wake up but that’s good enough for Ruby right now. As long as his chest keeps moving, even if it seems too shallow-- she can’t afford to think dumb, they have to get her back to the Manor, there’s crap there than can help. It helped with the vegetables in the basement, and Christina is far from that.

“Help me get her in the car.”

“This is fucking bullshit… you should have let her die.” Montrose mumbles.

Rage flares like pepper under her nose. She raises a pointy finger towards him. “No! You’re fucked up, old man! I had it. She wasn’t gonna do nothing.”

“You don’t know that!” he insisted, “When she wakes up, she gon’ kill us all!”

“According to with my calculations…” Hippolyta’s blue head peeks through the stone entrance, “There’s a 0.0000000112% probability of that happening.” Everyone stares at her, perplexed. “What? I’m never wrong.”

She did say she was going to hold off the mob of crazed villagers while they ran amok, trying to find Christina and Atticus. And there they were, all cloistered into a translucent, gigantic, wobbling bubble, like goldfishes in a bowl. Between metamorphosis and a nine-tailed fox spirit possessed woman, Ruby couldn’t bother thinking _this_ was any crazier. 

“Let’s get the fuck out of this place,” Atticus says, kissing Leti’s temple and circling her tummy with a protective hand before sliding a shoulder under Williams’ armpit, helping her and Ji-Ah carry him away.

* * *

The trip back was a fret with Ruby’s hand poised over William’s trunk, making sure he was breathing because most of the time it seemed like it wasn’t happening. In fact, he didn’t move the entire trip, not until the potion wore off and his skin distended and fought to stay together under the fit of Christina’s form. 

They had to stop the car, and Ruby does what William did for her that first time. Poor Leti emptied her stomach at the first carve. Montrose swore in disgust. Hippolyta observed with the interest of a scholar, while Tic and Ji-Ah helped her the best they could.

It was a relief to see her reborn intact. Not even the faintest of scars where deep ones should’ve been, not a blemish on her pale skin but the gristle remaining from Williams’. Still, she didn’t wake up and Ruby worries all over again.

Hours became days, and days became a week, and Christina remained in her comatose state. They slip in a doctor eventually, only to find nothing could be done. They conclude that maybe the sword was spiked with some spell that caused this. Hippolyta studies The Book of Names looking for something, more out of curiosity than anything else. Tic suggests that maybe they could try the same spell Christina did on Dee. Ruby will take anything at this point, she wants Christina back and Montrose out of her sight.

“How long you think this will keep her?” Leti asks after, when it’s just the two of them and the ghost of Christina.

Ruby shrugs, sponging another drop of blood from her bony shoulder, seldom reminiscent of the long baths they have shared not that long ago. 

“You love her, don’t you?”

And that-- that stops her. She swallows hard. Shit, she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing. She knows nothing. Perhaps she does. 

She interlocks her fingers with the cold, spectral ones at the edge of the bed. “I know she’s in there.” 

Leti sighs and places a kiss on top of her head. “I’m sorry, Ruby.”

She has no idea how long it passed so absorbed in her woes that she thought to phantom the light squeeze on her digits. 

“Chris…” she drones, leaning closer, expectant. Shakes her head when nothing happens but the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. 

She flumps back into the chair and that time when the squeeze happens it’s a smidgen more vivid... real. 

“Hey…” Christina croaks. “Did someone… interrupt… Ruby Baptiste… again?”

The sound that came out of Ruby's throat could’ve been embarrassing if she wasn’t already leaning onto those chapped lips. 

“I knew you’d come back to me,”

“It wasn’t a tough one,” Christina grins and licks her lips, voice still pasty from the unnatural sleep. “I did always like a demanding woman.” 

Ruby cradles the sharp of her cheek, smirking as Christina kissed the centre of her palm. “And I hate to give you reason but damn-- you need lip balm.”

“Well, where is it?” Christina beams, “I need to kiss you right.” 

Ruby moans, leaning onto her forehead… and fuck it if she didn’t.


End file.
